Seemed a likely outcome. On the way to being late, there were stories where basically they spent ungodly amounts of money in an attempt and then scrapped it because it wasn’t actually any better. And that this happened multiple times.

So if they were truly stuck, what to do? They could admit they were stuck, and watch the economic collapse as investors realize they were mistaken on how far along the technology curve things were, or they could market the hell out of GPT-5 and pretend it’s amazing and hope enough suckers and latecomers to LLM buy into that narrative that it carries through. Like Sam Altman acting ‘scared’ of what GPT-5 is going to be, “what have we done?” in a very melodramatic way like he’s Oppenheimer or something, likening it to the Death Star (all in all, a very ‘wtf’ situation, if it were really as dangerous as you say, you seem awfully eager to get it going).

So we have an incremental iteration with some good, some bad, and perhaps overall better, but in the context of the ungodly investment in the LLM sector, it’s way way less than would should reasonably expect.